Kernel Panic caused by intel driver?

Hey guys,

since upgrading to the kernel 3.6.* series I experience a lot of horrible instabilities on my ThinkPad X220 (Sandy Bridge) that I wanted to complain about:

1. When I boot the system I randomly get a Kernel Panic presumably caused by an intel driver. I cannot reproduce it, but it seems to be related to some wireless driver issue. I'm relatively sure about this, because it won't ever happen if I switched off wireless.

2. Wicd stopped detecting my wlan0 device as wireless. The reason is, that it simply looks for /sys/class/net/wlan0/wireless to exist, which is only visible with the kernel option WIRELESS_EXT_SYSFS switched on.

zcat /proc/config.gz | grep WIRELESS_EXT

doesn't show it up and looking up some kernel config brings me to the conclusion that it has been removed due to deprecation and the wicd developers didn't come up with a solution, although this problem is known for three years

Re: Kernel Panic caused by intel driver?

@fixje,

I noticed the same thing on my X230. At first I suspected it to be caused by power saving tools, iwl power management and pcie_aspm. So I disabled them all. It still happens and quite randomly. Sometimes it crashes the driver only and not the kernel itself. Reloading the driver doesn't work and only way out is a hard reboot. One thing that is common across all crashes is that it leaves "acpi_idle" and "intel_idle" errors in the back trace like yours and it happens mostly while running on battery!

Happens for me on 3.5 as well as 3.6. I experimented with BIOS' power options specifically Adaptive Thermal Management by turning it to maximum and disable PCI Express Power Management features. But it still continues to show the signs I reported in https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=137881

I also tried compat-wireless drivers.

If anything changes, I'll let you know.

Last edited by bassu (2012-11-08 05:39:04)

The greatest threat to knowledge is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge!

Re: Kernel Panic caused by intel driver?

I've had the same *_idle errors with an x220. It's very (very) infrequent and only on boot. I can't say anything about 3.6.5-6 as I can't even get them to boot (but that's looking like it might be my fault).

Re: Kernel Panic caused by intel driver?

I think I have the same panic on boot problem on my X220 (going to disable the quiet kernel parameter now to check). Is there any other way around it except PREEMPT/BFS? Not too interested in switching kernel just for this

It's pretty annoying since I reboot quite often while in school, and every 2-3 times it panics on boot.